HP Debuts Inkjet Web Press

By: Jim Rosenberg The HP Inkjet Web Press, a first for Hewlett-Packard Co., is a digital printing platform based on the company's Scalable Printing Technology that it claims will increase print productivity and lower the cost of printing for high-volume commercial markets.

For short- and not-so-short-run and lower-margin work, the press aims for the direct mail, transactional and transpromotional printing, book-publishing and newspaper markets by combining print-width, color-quality, productivity and cost benefits.

The first product from HP's Inkjet High-speed Production Solutions division, the 30.5-inch-wide Inkjet Web Press will go into a beta installation in December for a period of three or four months, with manufacturing to follow and the first orders to ship next fall, according to Francis McMahon, HP's U.S. marketing director for graphic arts.

At the drupa 2008 tradeshow about to open in Duesseldorf, Germany, HP will show a wider 36.5-inch configuration. Like the 30.5-inch press to be sold next year, the 36.5 device has a maximum speed of 400 feet per minute at 600 x 600 dots per inch.

HP Inkjet Web Press technology advances that aid productivity include a design that allows 10,560 nozzles per printhead and a bonding agent that secures the press's pigment inks to the paper's surface. The high nozzle count improves image quality, productivity and fault tolerance. Using the same printheads, the bonding agent pre-treats the media only where ink is applied, and increases color vibrancy while minimizing show-through on lightweight media.

The press's 30.5 size enables a range of imposition options, such as wide newspaper broadsheets, 12- and 16-page book signatures, and 7 x 14-inch transactional documents printed four-up. For standard A4 or U.S. letter-size documents, the HP Inkjet Web Press can produce up to 2,600 pages per minute.

McMahon says HP believes newspapers can avail themselves of on-demand printing of smaller quantities for parts of their readership. In the short terms, he says, it is "a technology that would complement what newspapers already have" in offset-printing capacity. In the longer term, however, he expects to see something comparable to what happened to production of marketing collateral, where digital printing became more economical for shorter runs.

Possibilities include: newspaper products other than the core daily edition; moving late-breaking news out from a national paper's newsroom and page-assembly hub to remote print sites to augment the main print runs; production of larger papers' local sections at distribution centers rather than trucking them from central plants, reducing their cost, stretching their deadlines and creating moe advertising opportunities at lower price; production of the local paper with a national or nearby metro daily, or the weekly addition of a certain section of the larger paper to the local paper for certain subscribers.

Because a newspaper would be printed in full format, the HP press will require suitable post-press equipment to gather and fold sections. "We have partnered with a number of different finishing partners," says McMahon. Those partners already include Hunkeler, Muller Martini and Pitney Bowes. McMahon adds that HP aims to be able to work with customers' already installed equipment. "We want to co-exist as best we can in that environment ... with current infrastructure."

* HP says the press requires no special media, is serviced easily with user-replaceable parts (including printheads), offers automated printhead alignment, press status management and ink container swapping, and can be integrated with HP SmartStream solutions for end-to-end workflow management. It puts product volumes at more than five million double-sided impressions per month, with a target monthly duty cycle of 70 million impressions.

A twin-engine configuration is priced at approximately $2.5 million, and HP says it expects consumables pricing to be under $0.01 for a four-color, 4/0 letter-size page (based on 30% coverage) and under $0.0015 for a black-only 4/0 letter-size page (based on 5% coverage). Different pricing plans will be based on usage (e.g., amount of color) and volume and capacity (number of cylinders and inkjet heads), with a la carte pricing available, including the purchase of consumables as needed.